Institutions that work in information rich environments

Peter Eckersley in "Finding a fair price for free knowledge" (New Scientist, 24 June 2009) argues that the abundance of information in cyberspace may require us to rethink our institutions. Copyright law has been created in an environment in which information was a scarce commodity, and it was (seemed) reasonable to adapt market mechanisms to information by creating property rights to it. Eckersley points out that increasingly information is not scarce. Unlike air, which is also necessary but in such abundant supply that everyone can use it, information must be created and there probably needs to be institutions to provide incentives to people to create information.

Of course we already have institutions related to different kinds of goods. We differentiate public goods that must be subsidized by government from goods we can leave to the marketplace. Moreover, we are accustomed as a society to invent new institutions to deal with new goods. Think of the extension of patent rights to biotechnology or of copyright to electronic media.

It will be interesting to see what evolves.